


Counting

by SegaBarrett



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Gen, Post-Donna's Departure
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-08
Updated: 2016-06-08
Packaged: 2018-07-13 22:20:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,204
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7139942
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SegaBarrett/pseuds/SegaBarrett
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Donna finds something new in her life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Counting

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Mossy_Bench](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mossy_Bench/gifts).



> Disclaimer: I don't own Doctor Who, and I make no money from this.

In her dreams, everything is bright and happy. Everything is wonderful. In her dreams she finds herself in cars she had never driven and places she has never been. She is suddenly important, the star of a show written by someone who feels that she deserves everything, that she is in some way important.

And in her dreams, it all makes sense.

When she wakes up, there is always an ache that she can’t exactly put a name to, and she hates herself for it. What is the point in hoping for things that can never come to be? Best be happy with what you’ve got, she tells herself again and again.

At least the temp agency has provided her with a new job.

Maybe last night’s dream will somehow come true in the new day – but it’s pretty unlikely.

Her new job is as an “inventory analyst”, which, she soon discovers, means that she uses a scanner that doesn’t work half the time to scan items at local retailers.  
Currently, this consists of towels. Stacks and stacks of towels with the tags curled under them that take precious seconds to curl out and scan.

Which lowers her average, her supervisor gleefully tells her.

“Donna, you need to hurry up.”

She’s surprised that he knows her name on the first day, but he has learned it in order to continually give her a hard time. She wants to rip the “finger laser” (finger this, she says to herself) off of her hand and stomp on it, along with the bloody machine that hangs on her hip.

But she doesn’t.

Donna Noble continues with her task, because what else is she supposed to do? This is what she had in front of her and even if it is hours and hours of counting, at least it is something, and something better than sitting around and wondering how her life has turned out the way that it has.

She closes her eyes every few moments because she got up far too early to drive to the site of the Great Towel Count of 2009. She wonders exactly what the fallout would be if she messed up on this. Maybe, she thinks as she continues to scan, being one towel off will result in some catastrophe that will reverberate throughout all galaxies.

That’s a strange thought. Donna never used to be this much of a dreamer. This is recent.

But how recently? She can’t really pin it down, and it feels like large times of the last few years have been a blur – it’s like she heard a song she really loved but cannot remember any of the actual lyrics.

It’s frustrating.

She finishes the rack of towels and looks at the final count on her machine – 45. 

She begins to count the towels by hand – that’s what they had said in training: verify, verify, verify! Make sure you counted the right numbers.

Two hand counts later, and she is still at 44. 

She wonders where the last towel came from. Maybe it was there and then not there.

She feels that way a lot of days.

***

The next day, they have moved from the wonderful world of towels on to a clothing store that seems to hold two sizes of clothing – too large and too small.

Donna wonders if this is because everyone bought all of the other clothing, or if this was by design. But how many people would walk out without being frustrated in a store that seemed to hold only the smallest and largest sizes of every outfit?

She sighs and starts to scan a rack of pants that had all been shoved together so tightly that separating them seems to be a Herculean task.

She closes her eyes again and there seems to be something right there, something just out of reach that she is trying to grasp but cannot quite get to, an itch she can’t seem to scratch. A lingering feeling that something is not right and needs to be fixed – but what, and how?

When she opens them again, she pulls a few pairs of pants off the rack and scans them.

She suddenly turns her head because she has the strangest feeling that something is brushing against her back.

When she looks, there’s nothing there.

Another beep, another scan, another tag.

***

She can just collapse on the carpet. That’d be totally fine with her. She would just look up at the ceiling and everyone would pass right by and keep scanning and beeping and… those beeps sound strangely familiar but that’s another thing she can’t quite place. Maybe she’s been dreaming and not remembering the dreams but knowing them somehow.

Maybe, in some way, she believes them. Dreams have got to be a step up from standing here at six in the morning with her hair tracking over this awful polo shirt and slipping a tiny laser on to her finger like she’s about to fight some sort of alien invasion.

Wouldn’t that be something?

“Everyone ready to go?” Her supervisor asks. She could really just grab him around the neck and throw him at the breakroom lockers – wouldn’t that be a sight? And then she would quip as he fell on the ground that no, she wasn’t ready to go, or even that maybe he should hurry it up because his scanning speed was going down already and people didn’t have all day.

Donna Noble does not do that, but there’s a certain joy in thinking about it. A certain sparkle in the thought of her being some kind of hero of the working class.  
There’s not a lot to aspire to as a temp, but that’s something.

She sighs and twists off the laser, sticking it on her index finger. She considers that there’s a lot of other places she could tell her supervisor to stick this laser.  
“I’m here! I’m here! Sorry I’m late!” 

Suddenly a whirlwind of motion breaks her out of her mental grousing and she looks up to see a man about her age dressed in the same sort of polo shirt. A man who has nearly knocked over another worker in his attempt to get in front of the supervisor.

The supervisor lets out an over-long sigh.

“You’re late again, Shaun,” he tells him, and then shoves a machine at him.

He settles back to stand next to Donna.

“New here?’ he asks.

“Third day. It’s a real hoot, it is.”

“Oh, it’s all I’ve ever wanted to do. Ever since I was a wee lad, I said to my parents, ‘Mum, Dad, let me come in at six in the morning and count things in stores for hours.’ And I have been blessed enough to actually do it.”

Donna bursts into giggles.

Maybe it’s not whatever calling keeps beating against her brain and her heart. Maybe it’s not the answer to whatever has been haunting her as of late.

But she has the strangest feeling that something good is going to happen; has already happened.

“I’m Donna.”

“Shaun.”

“Get to work!” her supervisor bellows at them, and for the first time, she’s actually looking forward to the next few hours.


End file.
